Posts Tagged sourcing images

Images In Posts – Sources and Methods

This is a revisit of this topic with updates and a look at how Live Writer works with the current versions of WordPress and Blogger.

Many new features have been implemented in the latest WordPress themes, and Blogger templates. Much is not supported by Live Writer since it has not been updated in the last three years, yet it still offers the best and easiest means of preparing blog posts. With higher resolution monitors and especially smart phones, tablets, and other devices, new questions arise on how to best deal with images.

Live Writer has a number of ways for inserting images. In Inserting a picture from your computer

this article the options will be covered in turn. Both the Home and the Insert tab provide an Insert – Picture option. There are four option in the drop-down menu:

From your computer…

From the web…

Create online album…

Add online album…

Inserting a picture from your computer

Most of the images that you wish to show in a blog post most likely start out on your computer. Live Writer allows you to scale the image so it will fit and be positioned the way you like. Three standard sizes are offered and those sizes can be set by you. The sizes are Small, Medium, and Large. There is actually a fourth size: Original. For this blog my sizes are set so that images fit nicely into the blog column.

Here the Large size is 640 pixels wide to take up the width of the column. The Medium size is 320 px so that two will fit side by side. The Small size is set to 200 px, allowing three across. Live Writer will prepare scaled images with the specified border and any additional features. The illustration above uses a white border and a watermark. Both of these features are done in Live Writer. The image that appears in the blog post is called a “thumbnail”, even though it might be rather large. Jumping ahead of the story a little: Click on the image above – the “source” image is actually smaller than the thumbnail her.

You do not need to prepare images to the desired size, Live Writer can do the scaling. However, there is something else to consider. An image in the post can link to something else. By default that is to the same picture, normally a larger version. On the Picture Tools tab (reached by clicking the image in Live Writer) you can set where the link goes to.

If you choose Link to: Source picture, when the visitor clicks the image the browser will show the “source” version. Most browser show it on a blank, white page, positioned in the upper left. That is not the prettiest way of doing it, but might be what you like.

You can specify the size of this source picture that will be shown on the blank page with the Link options setting. Clicking that option brings up a little dialog as shown here. There are again four size options, the Small, Medium, Large, and Original sizes. The standard sizes are the same as the sizes for the thumbnails. The Original size, however, will be the actual size that the image is on your computer. Most modern digital cameras produce images way bigger than will fit conveniently into a browser window, even on the newer monitors or devices with their high resolution. That brings us back to the “however” above. You should scale your picture to a size that is appropriate. The image displayed by clicking the image link should show the picture better and larger, unlike the pots above. But you don’t want the source picture to overwhelm. For the past few years I have used “originals” that are 1024 px on the larger side. Those used to fill the browser nicely, but with the progress to higher resolution displays even in phones and small handheld devices, I have been using 2000 px lately. If you don’t link to another version of the image, of course, you need not worry about the original size as it will not be shown or uploaded.

Where to the images go?

Live Writer uploads the prepared “thumbnail” image and the “source” image, if used, to the blogging service. If you are using WordPress both images go into your Media library. This is a “flat” file, that is, it is not further divided, just a large shoe box full of pictures. If you are on Blogger, the images are uploaded to you Google album “Windows Live Writer”. NOTE: Blogger imposes a limit on the number of images uploaded for one post. You might run into that limit if you have a large number of photos. I did with a story on a car show last year, so I just split the post into two ( British Car Fayre 1 and British Car Fayre 2 ). Google storage rules are such that images smaller than about 2024 px are not charged to the space used.

Inserting pictures from the web

The second insert option in Live Writer is “From the web…”. This allows a wide range of sources, but assuming that you want images of your own that you have online, the range shrinks quite a bit. When you click From the web… a small dialog pops up. You need the web address, URL, of the image, not the page it might be on.

NOTE: Although it is easy to get an URL of most any image on the Internet, you can’t just grab it and insert it into your blog. Plagiarism applies to images as it does to text. Don’t steal, don’t borrow, don’t “quote”, unless you have permission from the owner of the image. Stick to your own.

Where to store and get images

The easiest web place to store your images is, of course, your blogging service. Live Writer can upload pictures to your blogging service, but sometimes it might be easier to upload them yourself directly and then retrieve the URLs.

WordPress

In your WordPress account Dashboard you have your Media Library. WordPress has made many improvements in this area. Uploading is easy and uses a drag-and-drop method. You can easily get the web address for images already in your WordPress Media Library, just go to the Media library, click on the image you want. The image URL is in one of the property boxes. You can also right-click the image and click Copy Image Location.

Blogger

If you have a Blogger blog, you have a Google account and, as noted above, your images uploaded by Live Writer are in the Windows Live Writer album. Don’t add images manually to that album. The most recent additions go to the end of the normal listing and that may mean a lot of scrolling to find what you want. You can use any other album for storing photos, of course, and you can get the URL for any of your Google photos and insert them into a post. Just be sure that your album is made public so your readers will be able to see the image. To get the image URL from your Google Photos, right-click the image, then click Copy image URL, it will be loaded into your clipboard. Since this method does not involve the upload limit for a blog post, you can insert any number of images into your post.

Flickr

Flicker is one of the oldest photo sharing services and has some very nice features. Unfortunately, being friendly to blogging is not one of them, they don’t want to provide the URLs to your own images. So don’t plan on sourcing photos from Flickr. You can link to your images and albums there, they show nicely and you can provide slide shows. But for inserting an image in the post, forget Flickr.

OneDrive

Microsoft OneDrive, the former SkyDrive, is meant to be your file cabinet in the cloud. It is organized in folders and subfolders, so managing your images is really easy – just like on your desktop computer. Uploading is drag-and-drop. Getting to the URL is a matter of clicking on the image and then clicking View original. The image shows full size on a blank page and its URL is in the browser address field. Microsoft does a very good job of managing access to stuff in your OneDrive, so make sure that the folder is public.

Problems with images from the web

When you use pictures from the web, there are some concerns that you don’t need to address when using pictures from your computer option in Live Writer. An image on the web is stored in the size that was uploaded. As I mentioned above, for me that is nowadays 2000 px on the large side. When you use the Insert – From the web… procedure, Live Writer will insert the picture in whatever size it is. You can use the Size controls to get it to the size you like in the post. There is another “however” here. When someone looks at you blog post, the browser has to download the image and rescale it for display. That process is not as fast as downloading an image that is already the correct size. You blog post might not load as fast as you like and not as fast as it could if the images were the correct size already. If you use just a few images, that may not make a noticeable difference.

Create online album… – Add online album…

Live Writer has a delightful feature that it calls “online album”. A group of small thumbnails can be arrayed in different layouts as a representation of an entire album. Live Writer then uploads the entire album, or alternatively using an existing online album. Links are provided for seeing the pictures in the album. This feature goes back to the days even before SkyDrive. Live Writer used the Microsoft online storage service since its infancy and still works like a charm with OneDrive. However, it only works with OneDrive! There are some limitations that date back in time that have not been updated.

The dialog that comes up when Create online album… is selected allows you to drag pictures form your anywhere on your computer and combine them as one album.

The album is inserted when you click Insert and then you have a large array of options as to layout and other features.

When you publish the post with an album, the images in the album are uploaded to your OneDrive, into an folder in the root of the OneDrive called by the album name you specified. Other images that you inserted “from your computer” will go to your blogging service.

But wait, there is more!

You can move that “album” folder in your OneDrive to another location. All the links will be correctly preserved.

So these are the methods for inserting images into a blog post using Live Writer. I have pointed out some of the items that you must be careful with. In spite of the fact that Live Writer has not been updated in years, it still provides features and convenience unmatched by any other tool.

Windows Live Writer dates from ancient history by modern standards, it was born back in the days when Microsoft offered “Spaces”. That was a personal web site and blogging service. Live Writer offered a a WYSIWYG, “what you see is what you get”, interface to make preparing blog posts really easy and accessible to everyone. Images were stored on your Spaces site.

Spaces is long gone, the online storage became SkyDrive and changed name more recently to OneDrive. Live Writer is part of Windows Essentials and hasn’t been updated in two years. Still, Live Writer is the best blogging editor there is. Nothing else comes close.

Does Live Writer work with OneDrive?

Absolutely, and beautifully too! OneDrive, unlike other “cloud” photo storage services, is organized in folders and sub-folders just like the file storage system on computers. There have been many changes and improvements in OneDrive cloud storage but no matching updates to Live Writer, so it works as it did years ago. Some compromises are required and some new quirks have been introduced, but these you can live with. In the next section I will take a look at the various features and describe how they work nowadays – mid-year 2014.

To check the current operation, I prepared two blog posts to illustrate the features and problems. I first prepared and published the post on Gallery Ludwig. Here is a screen capture of the way it looks. I incorporated a number of the unique features that Live Writer offers for managing the appearance and layout of illustrations. After publication to Gallery Ludwig, a WordPress blog, I opened the post in Live Writer and selected another of my blogs, Café Ludwig, that is very different in layout, so I made scaling changes to fit the post into the narrower layout of that blog, and published it to Café Ludwig, a Blogger blog.

Picture Effects

Live Writer has some nice picture effects like tilting the image, applying frames and more. Most of these effects are only available when the image is sourced from the computer as you prepare the post. Specifically frames, tilting, watermarks, and picture effects require local photos. Live Writer adds these changes to a new copy of the image. This new image is uploaded to the blog site when the post is published. In fact Live Writer may upload two copies, a “thumbnail” and a “source picture”. If the blog is hosted by WordPress the images go to the Media Library. When hosted on Blogger the images are sent to your Google Photos album to an album by the name “Windows Live Writer”. The images in the post are the “thumbnails”. Live Writer will provide a hyperlink to the “source picture” if that is selected in the properties section.

My preference is to use the “Source picture” option very little, because the browser display it in just a plain, ugly view of the photo. I prefer to link to a photo in a OneDrive album, or folder. This gets us to sourcing from OneDrive.

Sourcing images from OneDrive

OneDrive has become an easy to operate online file storage system. Sourcing photos from a OneDrive album is best done by accessing it in a browser. The image must have sharing set to “Everyone”, that is public. This is best done by having the containing folder set to public sharing. When the photo is displayed in OneDrive the URL in the browser address bar provides a link to that page.

The illustration above shows the URL selected to be copied (Ctrl+C) so it is available for use in Live Writer.

To link a picture that was sourced from the computer, click on the picture, then click Insert > Hyperlink. The copied URL will already be in the dialog.

If special features on the image are not needed, it is easy to source the image right from OneDrive. This way Live Writer will not need to upload the photo to the blog site. For this approach click “View original” when the photo is viewed (see the illustration above). This shows the photo by itself. The URL may now be copied from the browser address bar.

In the post draft in Live Writer select Insert > Picture – From the web. Then paste the URL into the dialog. Click Insert. Then you can position the image, resize, set the margins on the Picture Tools ribbon (click the picture to bring up this ribbon).

You can arrange the layout as you like. Remember that you downloaded the blog layout settings when you added the blog account to Live Writer.

One of the beautiful features of Live Writer is the ability to add a collage of photos from an OneDrive album.

Adding a collage from a OneDrive album

Live Writer can prepare a collage right from the pictures in a OneDrive album. There is one important catch: The album must not be a sub-folder. It has been this way from the earliest days of Live Writer, so this is nothing new. If you are newly uploading the photos to your OneDrive, just make sure you do it in a newly created folder right on the first page. Make that folder public. If you already have an album that you wish to use, move it to the first page. After you have prepared the post in Live Writer you can move your album to any folder or subfolder as you wish. Don’t worry about breaking links – none will be broken. That is part of the charm of OneDrive!

Time and “improvements” in OneDrive have made the links that are on the collages operate not as expected, but close. The “VIEW SLIDE SHOW” link just gets you to the OneDrive album. You don’t get a “Play slide show” option until you click one of the pictures. The links of the individual square thumbnails get you to the “View original” display of the full sized image in a plain browser window. This, by the way, is lost in the translation to another blog. You can check that in the Café Ludwig post. Guess that is asking just a bit too much of Live Writer.

So as you can see, OneDrive and Live Writer work very nicely together. That you can move folders around in OneDrive without breaking any links is a really nice feature. After preparing the first post with the two collages I moved the folder from the main page to a sub-folder. As you can easily ascertain, the links work fine.

For some time there was no straightforward way to get the URLs of photos in Windows Live SkyDrive albums. With the recent update (November 2011) there is now easy access to the original photos stored in SkyDrive.

The information pane for a photo now contains a “View original” link. So with just one click the browser goes to and displays the original. The URL can be easily copied from the browser address bar.

SkyDrive web addresses, URLs, are incredibly long, typically more than 140 characters. No way can you write those done, so just copy the URL with Ctrl+C and then paste it to the destination with Ctrl+V. This works just fine with the Live Writer Insert – Picture tool. Click From the web… to open the Insert Web Image dialog.

The photo is previewed in the dialog window. Click Insert to place it into your post.

The image will be inserted in full size and most likely overflow the blog margins and the Live Writer window. In the Size group of the Picture Tools ribbon click Lock aspect ratio, then you can resize the image to fit as you like. Remember you can replace the size value to obtain a custom size, you are not limited to the presets of Small, Medium, or Large.

If you forget to click Lock aspect ratio the resized image will be stretched or squashed, just redo the operation.

By default, for an imported web image, the Link to: setting will be None. If you wish to link to the actual image in SkyDrive or to another web address, click the down arrowhead next to the option, then select Web address… the Insert Hyperlink dialog opens. You will need to paste the URL of the image or whatever you want to link to. Be sure to fill in the Title: field. If you don’t see the field, click Advanced. The text in the Title: field will be shown in a text balloon when a viewer hovers the pointer on the image in your post.

If you wish to link to the image in your album as shown in SkyDrive, use the image address for this photo, do not get and insert the Embed code (offered in the information pane). The embed code is an “iframe” set that is stripped out by WordPress for wordpress.com blogs. It can be used on webpages and self-hosted blogs. But that is really another topic.

One note of caution: The SkyDrive sharing system has been extensively revised. The prior settings have been “grand-fathered” in. I urge you to carefully learn the new approach to sharing. Files and photos take the share setting of the containing folder (or album), they can also be shared individually. For sharing images in a public blog, be sure that the image sharing is set to Everyone, either for the photo or for the containing folder.

As you can see in the illustration at the right, the new, simpler system is anything but. Sharing is sure to cause a lot of confusion and there are bound to be changes soon.

Nikon myPicturetown is a photo sharing site that offers a convenient way of storing images and obtaining their URLs for sourcing to blogs and websites. What gives this service additional appeal is the ability to share a photo album without the viewer being provided access to your other albums on the site. Although aimed at users of Nikon cameras, anyone can register a free account with 2 GB of storage. Setting up an account is straight-forward: Just go to myPicturetown and click “New Registration (Free)”.

Sign-up has the usual onerous “Terms and Conditions” but does not ask for much besides name and email address. You do need Adobe Flash Player installed to use the site and Adobe AIR is required for the upload tool, a desktop app.

Uploading images to myPicturetown

The upload process is simple but a bit unusual. Double-clicking the desktop shortcut brings up the Japanese language version of the upload window then quickly launches your browser and goes to your MyPicturetown account. If you selected to stay signed in on your prior visit you will not need to sign in. The account home page shows a collage of some of your photos – nice – and a small Nikon ad which can be closed – a small price to pay for the service.

Click Upload (lower left of collage) and the desktop app opens – this time for me in English. This is a drag and drop procedure and works very smoothly. The album to upload to can be selected or a new one created. Click Upload and the process starts. For each file there is a progress bar showing the portion already uploaded. Even during this upload process additional images can be added to the window and will be uploaded.

Note of caution: Not all file types are accepted. You can upload JPG files but not PNG files.

Note of caution: You can upload photos in their original size, however, you cannot use or link to the full size images if they are larger than 1024 pixels horizontally, for vertical images the max size is even smaller. This is similar to the way Flickr works. However, the full size images are available to you for downloading.

Getting the image URL

Once your images are stored in an album on your myPicturetown site, getting URLs to the images is a very simple matter. If your uploaded images are larger than 1024 pixels (max horizontal dimension) only down-sized images will be available as links. Navigate to your MyPicturetown album and click the thumbnail of interest. Click the “i”, , in the tool bar to open an information pane on the left. Scroll down to see a section labeled Blog Links: – see Nikon provided for your needs. For most images three sizes are offered and the pixel dimensions are shown. For images larger than 1024 px scaled down images are offered. For very small images only one or two sizes might be shown. For example, for the “i” image here only the actual 42×44 pixels size is offered.

The illustration on the right shows what I am talking about.

Click the size you want, the URL is shown in the Link URL: box. Click it to select it then press Ctrl+C to copy the address to your clip board.

Using the image URL

In Live Writer click the Picture command (in the Insert group on the Home ribbon, or in the Media group on the Insert ribbon).

Select From the web …, in the Insert Web Image dialog paste (Ctrl+V) the address into the Picture web address: field. The main area will show a thumbnail of the image. Note my clever illustration here of the dialog window showing a screen clip of the insert operation.

All the images in this article are sourced from my myPicturetown site. In fact, I kept the upload app open as I prepared this post and uploaded the illustrations as I needed them. One of the illustrations links to a larger image, move the pointer over the images to see the one (all right, it is the one showing the blog links).

Getting a link to a slide show is more complicated, you need to “share” the album (click the icon in the tool bar). Sharing is done by sending an email which contains the link, a very long URL. See this illustrated in my Café Ludwig post Sharing Photos with myPicturetown

Nikon myPicturetown is a very blog friendly site. You will likely be as impressed with as I am.

Windows Live Writer makes inserting pictures so easy that many bloggers never need to know what happens behind the “curtain”. Here is a quick look and review of the process.

There are two methods shown in the Insert – Picture menu: “From your computer…” and “From the web…”. A third method is simply to paste an image from the clipboard. The first image here was inserted by the paste, Ctrl+V, method.

Just so I can demonstrate what happens, here is a picture inserted by the “From your computer…” route.

In Live Writer the images can be positioned, scaled, framed, even artistically modified and a watermark can be added. It all looks just as it will appear in the published post.

When you click the Source tab (near bottom left of the Live Writer window) you see something like this:

There are no images there, just text. Actually HTML code. The references to the pictures, excerpted from the code, are like this:

… href=”$image[5].png” … src=”$image_thumb[3].png” …

… href=”$mothA15[3].jpg” … src=”$mothA15_thumb.jpg” …

… href=”$LWB-110813-02[5].png” … src=”$LWB-110813-02_thumb[3].png” …

No such files exist on my computer, I do have a “mothA15.jpg” and a “LWB-110813-02.jpg” but these designations in the code are strange, there is the extra dollar-sign, $, and the bracketed numbers, as well as the “_thumb” entries, what is that all about? Well, this is how Live Writer keeps track of the images – these actually are saved on the computer.

When the post is published these images are uploaded to the blog site folder for storing images. To demonstrate where they go, I did a “Post draft to blog” command (Home – Publish group) of this post. This being a WordPress blog, I then opened my WordPress Dashboard and opened Posts. The draft was listed on top, of course. I opened it in Edit mode and clicked the HTML tab. There was the code, except now the references to the images were like this: